IT Assistant Vice President Yvonne Flood enjoys the customer relations program she implemented the most.

Yvonne Flood, assistant vice president of Information Technology, is a second-generation Metro State employee.

“Mom steered me towards Metro,” Flood explains. Her mother, Betty Flood, worked for Metro State for almost 10 years in the Public Relations Office before retiring to Houston, Texas.

In a career at Metro State that now spans 28 years, Flood started in 1979 as a program assistant in the Health Career Science Program, which worked to encourage minority students to go into health careers. After a year, she moved to  the Dean’s Office in what was then the School of Science and Math. After that she spent “about a year” at the Institute of Women’s Studies and Services.

While at the women's institute, Flood became a Metro State student and took classes part-time. She was a young mother with two kids at the time. “They encouraged women to educate themselves,” Flood said. “They planted the seed.”

When she began to work in Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the seed took root. “I really got serious about going to school,” Flood said. She got her degree in health care administration in 1991 but it was her minor in computer systems management where her future lay.

After Academic Affairs, Flood managed the president’s office for 16 years. “Four different presidents!” Flood remembers. “There was a lot of changeover but I was with Dr. Kaplan for ten years.” It was a job Flood enjoyed but after a while she needed a new challenge.

Leon Daniels, then CIO and vice president for IT, began talking to Flood about coming to his department. “They needed to set up administration for IT, to set up the business processes,” Flood says. So, in 2000, she became the director of information technology administration. She was a key player when the fledgling department was pioneering systems the campus now takes for granted. She helped set up and administer the IT Help Desk, the database and data management system, and the collegewide procurement of system and desktop equipment, peripherals and software—all while supervising administrative and technical staff and overseeing $8.5 million.

Marylou Jarvis, CIO from 2001-02, provided mentorship to Flood and encouraged her to go further in her education. Flood got a master of science in computer information systems from the University of Phoenix in 2004. In June of that year, she assumed her current position as assistant vice president. Her job is complex and demanding with one facet she particularly enjoys.

“I created and implemented the Customer Relationship Management Program, which serves as a communications link between IT and campus constituents,” Flood says. In this role she assigns staff to meet with deans, chairs and professors to have a “kind of casual conversation” to help them do their jobs.

“I thought that was a critical means of communication that we needed to get going,” Flood explains. Rather than the problem-oriented approach of the Help Desk and the daily round of fixing needs and solving complaints her job usually entails, “the whole purpose of this program is to find out what their needs are.” Flood says she gets invaluable ideas just talking to and meeting people.

“By going to them, you hear the good things as well, the good ideas instead of just the problems,” Flood says.

And for Flood the bottom line is “to improve student’s experience in the classroom through technology.”